Danmei in Taiwan and Hong Kong, as well as yaoi in Japan, South Korea and beyond have, since the 1990s, expanded from comics into films, novels, online serials and a swath of other media forms and commodities. Yanrui Xu and Ling Yang trace the origin of mainland danmei to the year 1998, its continued growth drawing heavily on bootleg Japanese yaoi. In China, danmei currently takes the form of chiefly online fan fiction on nomadic websites whose creators outwit regulators' abilities to censor them. In Sinophone contexts, yaoi is called danmei (耽美), which is the Mandarin reading of what in Japanese is read as tanbi or aesthetic indulgence/intoxication by beauty. Today, yaoi has grown into a global phenomenon that is particularly popular in East Asia where, since the late 1990s, it has garnered millions of fans.
The genre began in amateur manga (comics), or dōjinshi, culture in 1970s Japan. Yaoi is a genre of storytelling featuring male-male eroticism and romance whose primary audience is girls and women.Rethinking Yaoi on the Regional and Global Scale Intersections: Gender and Sexuality in Asia and the Pacific
